September 28, 2011

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New York City is teeming with writers — ﻿journalist, novelists, poets, essayists — ﻿all hoping to catch their big break. So it’s no surprise that many of our greatest American novels are set in Gotham. Yet there’s something refreshing about a fantastic Los Angeles novel as well. The Barbarian Nurseries﻿ by Héctor Tobar﻿, which will be featured as a B&N Discover Great New Writers pick this holiday season, is the newest addition to the list of great fiction set in the City of Angels. In honor of the publication of his captivating new L.A. novel, we asked Hé﻿ctor to provide his own list of favorite L.A. works.

The short novel book, written in 1939, is a truly wonderful portrait of the central Los Angeles of his day, and of a neighborhood which, but a few decades later, was largely wiped off the map: Bunker Hill. You can read Ask the Dust﻿ like a literary archaeologist, trying to see bits and pieces of a lost L.A. But the book is much more than that. It’s a tender portrait of the wounded souls gathering, during the Great Depression, in a city that was a new, sunny and yet incredibly lonely place. Fante’s L.A. is filled with “broken, uprooted people from the East.” They find little happiness here, and even the ground beneath them isn’t solid. “Los Angeles was doomed,” Fante writes, pages after describing an earthquake. “It was a city with a curse upon it.”

This was published the same year as “Ask the Dust,” and thanks to Humphrey Bogart’s bravura performance in the film adaptation, it’s the much better known of the two books. The Big Sleep﻿ was also the first of the Marlowe detective novels, and helped established an image of Los Angeles in the national consciousness as a seedy, venal place. It’s sort of what everyone wanted to believe about a metropolis that seemed to mock the rest of the country with its affluence and its pretty and fit people. Here, too, Chander tells us, there is inequality, unfairness, and the powerful and the greedy weave webs that swallow up the pure and the good. “…I was part of the nastiness now,” Marlowe says at the end of The Big Sleep﻿. Marlowe was such a convincing character he generated countless imitations, fictitious detectives who keep taking L.A. back to the “nastiness” again and again.

Himes later became famous for a series of Harlem novels. But this 1945 book is set in South-Central Los Angeles and the L.A. shipyards during World War II. It’s dripping with anger, raw and sexually charged. As in Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” (a superior book, to be honest) there’s a moment where the African-American protagonist gets himself in a situation with a white woman that looks perilously close to rape without ever being consummated: it’s a metaphor, of course, for the anger and apparent impotence of the non-white in the L.A. of the 1940s. They are people who can’t escape their second-class status despite living in a city and time where just about anyone, black or white, can make a lot of money.

There are magazine articles about Los Angeles longer than this 1966 novel, but no book quite so wacky and weird. Here we have the fictional suburb San Narciso and assorted other inventions from Pynchon, an Easterner who, I gather, really hated being here among us. Still, “Crying” contains some of the best examples of what a truly demented literary genius can do with the truly demented elements of our physical landscape. To wit: “What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.” True, much of the book is rather a juvenile send-up of the more superficial aspects of our culture. (A radio station with the call letters KCUF? Really?) But for sheer linguistic inventiveness, few books set in So Cal can rival “Lot 49.”

I list here only the most recent work (from 2010) in Straight’s excellent and essential oeuvre, much of which is centered around a fictional Los Angeles suburb named Rio Seco. Her books give us among the best portraits of the lives of working people in the Southern California of the late 20th and early 21st century. They are people with links to tragic rural places — the segregated south, impoverished Latin America — who’ve landed among the now-aging citrus groves and dust of the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles. In this novel, their travels take them to a dive-bar called the Golden Gopher in central Los Angeles (a real place, now renovated and yuppified). Straight’s characters violate all sorts of conventions of L.A. literature. Among other things, they walk long distances across the cityscape. “Nobody walked home from Downtown to Los Feliz. Only a walkin’ fool.”

A free sample excerpt from Héctor﻿’s book is available for download on the product page now.

NOOK owners: Go to shop and search for “Héctor Tobar﻿﻿” to download this wonderful L.A. novel.